Soto gives SBOE a thoughtful parting gift

Michael Soto wraps up his short tenure on the State Board of Education next week, but he was thoughtful enough to leave behind a gift.

Soto, the Trinity University English professor who was knocked off in this year's Democratic primary by the little-known Marisa Perez, spent much of his two years on the board grappling with frustration over the state's cumbersome textbook mandates.

So, in his final months in office, he quietly rewrote the board's rules governing the adoption of instructional materials.

Those changes, coupled with a 2011 state law that let some oxygen into the room for school district curriculum planners, could mean that textbook publishers will no longer view Texas as the rich, crazy uncle they need but wish they could avoid.

“It's a whole new ballgame,” Soto says.

In recent years, the state board has been too busy relitigating the Scopes Monkey Trial to get around to the 21st-century realities of K-12 education. We've seen San Antonio's own Ken Mercer, the most affable culture warrior you could ever hope to meet, cheerfully define his opponents as Godless, phonics-hating “educrats.”

Most importantly, we've seen conservatives throw out their justified faith in local control by dictating exactly what school kids around the state must be taught to believe about American exceptionalism or the role of Christianity in the American Revolution.

SBOE curriculum debates have brought more ridicule down on the state during the past four years than any issue this side of secessionism. That was partially remedied in 2011 by Senate Bill 6, which provided school districts some latitude to go outside the SBOE-approved book list.

If SB 6 changed the framework, Soto helped to fill in the picture. In essence, he reduced the power of his own board and managed to convince his colleagues that it was a good idea.

“I wanted to encourage school districts to think creatively about how they used their instructional materials,” Soto says. “And I wanted publishers to have significantly more freedom to be creative and still remain a part of the state adoption process.”

Ultimately, that meant more deleting than writing; scratching nonsensical rules such as the one that mandated textbook publishers to mention a required element of the state curriculum three times.

“I would ask my colleagues, 'Why are we specifying how many times something has to be mentioned?' They said, 'Three times is better than one, because students will encounter it more and be more likely to remember it,'” Soto says. “So I said, 'By that logic, why not require it 50 times?'”

Before Soto's rule changes, if a school wanted to buy a teacher's manual from a publisher, it was obligated to also shell out money for textbooks. Soto eliminated that requirement, enabling publishers to tailor their products more precisely to the needs of individual districts.

Soto also threw out the board's onerous old mandate that all electronic instructional materials be platform-neutral, automatically ruling out innovative material in Android, iPad, Kindle, Windows or Mac formats.

Soto has a low-key personality and a nuanced way with the language, and he has managed to maintain civil relationships with the board's social crusaders. He says they didn't initially understand why his suggested rules changes were necessary but ultimately backed most of the recommendations.

The repercussions could resound nationally. Texas has long dominated the agenda for textbook publishers because unlike states such as California, which allows individual school districts to make their own choices, this state had a powerful board that could, on a creationist whim, dictate the purchases for 10 percent of the schools in the country.

Publishers coveted board approval, even if they resented the hoops they were forced to jump through. Now, they can avoid the hoops altogether.

“If I were a publisher, I would simply bypass the state adoption process,” Soto says. “I expect a number of publishers to market directly to school districts.”